and then one of the guys called me to do some
MMA sparring.” Mahamed’s tall and lanky frame
suited his kickboxing well, but when his partner
took things to the ground he found himself the
quick recipient of a triangle, and just like that, the
jiu jitsu bug had bitten him.
Becoming a Grappler
Mahamed began to train after a friend invited him
to come along with him to Eduardo Brigadeiro’s
academy. Brigadeiro, a de La Riva black belt, in-
stilled a love for the gi in Mahamed, who stuck to
what he was good at early on. “I started doing
open guard, closed guard and triangles. I didn’t
even know about half guard and stuff. I only did
closed, open guard, and triangles, and if I wasn’t
doing them it’s be-
cause they’d already
passed my guard. I
trained for like one
year only doing that
and I got good at it,”
said Mahamed.
As lower belts, when
we catch a higher belt
in a sweep or submis-
sion we’ve been work-
ing hard at, we feel
an enormous sense of
pride. When they tell
us to stop relying on
the same technique all
the time, a common,
instinctive reaction is
that they don’t want
us to catch them any-
more. When this hap-
pened to Mahamed,
he didn’t take it as them not wanting to catch
him, he took it as them wanting him to catch
up. He noted, “I started doing good with high-
er belts, and they told me I had to start doing
other stuff, because I was getting good at it, but
if I only did that [technique] I wasn’t learning jiu
jitsu. That’s when I started doing other stuff, be-
cause if I couldn’t catch the triangle they passed
my guard.”This point was further emphasised at Mahamed’s
first tournament when he was paired against a
very large competitor. Once Mahamed’s oppo-
nent broke his guard and got a leg over for half
guard, he was clueless as to what to do. Much
like the triangle during his first experience with jiu
jitsu, the feeling of helplessness sparked a hun-
ger to learn the art. “After my first [tournament]
all I did back then was half guard. I was doing
half guard all the time, and I started to learn
that until I wasn’t bad.
I started improving,
then I started to sweep
people: now I’m on
top so I have to either
pass or control them.
I started learning a
lot, and started doing
some wrestling in Bra-
zil, and then I started
getting better,” said
Mahamed.Even though Ma-
hamed was training
jiu jitsu he still desired
to become an MMA
fighter, so when he
got an opportunity to
train with the Nogueira
brothers he jumped at
the chance. He start-
ed training with them
three times a week, and they began to mentor
him and prepare him for an eventual career in
MMA. Mahamed was tall and heavy for his age,
but at 17, he was still just a child, so there weren’t“I STUDIED PROGRAMMING,
SOFTWARE DESIGN. I WAS
SUPPOSED TO GO TO COLLEGE
FOR IT AFTER HIGH SCHOOL,
BUT I DIDN’T BECAUSE I
FOCUSED ON JIU JITSU”